Peru - Day 6 - actually day 5 I think.

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Hola!

I´m in Arequipa, which travelblog doesn´t seem to want to recognize. I´m posting this one now while it´s still fresh in my mind, I´ll try to get day 5 posted asap.

Last night we ate a late dinner at about 9pm in Nazca (a very nice dinner, I had baby goat. Yum!), because we were taking the night bus from Nazca to Arequipa. We had another two rounds of Pisco Sours, the restaurant had it´s own version that added blue Curacao...Mmmmm. It was a load of fun, I´d go back to that restaurant in a heartbeat. I think it was called Porton. I´ll ask Elard (our group guide) later.

The night bus was a double-decker sleeper type bus that was quite comfy. We all sat up at the front of the bus on the top level, I got the seat directly above the driver. I managed to get a pretty solid 7 hours of sleep in (probably helped by the Pisco Sours), but I do remember waking up at about 4am, and thinking that we seemed to be going downhill awfully fast. I decided I couldn´t do anything about it anyway, and went back to sleep. I was told by Tim later that we did indeed make a few downhill speed runs, so I´m glad I wasn´t awake and watching, I probably wouldn´t have slept in that case. Fortunately there was a curtain that we had blacking out the windshield and side windows, so it was all good. When I finally came to around 7am, we opened the windows and found ourselves about an hour outside of Arequipa, driving thorough some mountains with steep dropoffs and lots of switchbacks. Our driver, in traditional Peruvian style, was passing trucks and vans at an alarming rate; but as usual, we managed to avoid running into anything. As I was sitting next to Elard, he gave me a few interesting facts about the region. Apparently, Arequipa is to Peru as Quebec is to Canada, although a little more extreme. They have their own beer, which they refuse to export to the rest of the country, they even had their own passports and currency at one point. In his words "Arequipa is kinda like a different country, yes?"

To give you a brief rundown of what I learned today, it´s built at the foot of a dormant volcano ¨"El Misti". It is also known as the white city, after the white volcanic rock they use to build many of their buildings. It has a lot of history, which I didn´t really have much time to learn about, but I did visit two Monastaries (sp?), as well as a Cathedral. I found it very interesting that the faces and bodies in the paintings in the Cathedral were modeled on local people. In retrospect, I should think that it should have been pretty obvious had I actually thought about it, but it was a revelation to me nonetheless. Local painters paint local people. Huh. Figure that one out.

All ignorance aside, the paintings and decoration of the Cathedral and the more important parts of the monastaries were fantastic in their detail. It was somewhat sad to see that not all of the works had been restored, many of them were decaying even. Yet another stark contrast between the priorities of a developing country such as Peru, and a first-world one such as France. There were a number of works in each location that seemed to be worthy of a place in a museum, or at least proper preservation in situ. The monastary in particular had no protection from the elements for many of íts works of art.

We´re going to dinner tonight at 7pm, tomorrow morning we hop on another bus to the Colca Canyon for a couple of days so we can acclimitize to the altitude. I Think that Arequipa is about 2600m above sea level, Colca is about 3600m.

I´ll try to post photos soon!

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